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I read an article that claimed the world does not reward perfection. Perfectionism, the author argued, sacrifices productivity and happiness. Perfectionists are too slow and get less done. We love their products, but we’re not willing to wait for them. It’s a paradox I’ve run into at work. The work products of perfectionists are indeed very high quality. We just wish they got there faster.
But if your product is nuclear power plants, airplanes or medicines, suddenly perfectionism is good. I don’t know about you, but I like my nuclear engineers, my doctors and my airline pilots to be perfectionists. But that sustainability report you are writing or that new strategy you are developing could be moved along faster without stopping the world. Make a decision; allow it to go; accept the consequences; learn from it; revise; go again. But what if your boss’ standards are different? You might be willing to sacrifice a bit of quality for speed – but what if your boss is unhappy with the quality of what you are giving him/her? Finding this right balance can be tricky.
But outside of work, the ‘rules’ of perfectionism can be different. I’m a quilter. I spent a year designing and sewing a quilt for my brother and his wife. It was a complicated pattern that required sewing squares together, cutting diamonds on the intersections, and then twisting them back to squares and sewing them back together again. You can see how it would be easy to mess that up! But I was careful and methodical, going from the floor of one bedroom to the sewing machine in another and was sure that I’d made no mistakes. It wasn’t until the borders were on the quilt that I found one square had been rotated wrong! Oh no! But the wise woman who taught me to quilt also taught me that every quilt should (or at least does) have a mistake -- and you should embrace it as a reflection of your humanness. “It will make you smile years later,” she said. My mistake on this quilt was briefly obvious to me, but my sister-in-law couldn’t see it when I pointed to the problem area. This morning, I’m with my quilt at my brother’s house and guess what -- two years later, I can’t even find it on the quilt!
But if your product is nuclear power plants, airplanes or medicines, suddenly perfectionism is good. I don’t know about you, but I like my nuclear engineers, my doctors and my airline pilots to be perfectionists. But that sustainability report you are writing or that new strategy you are developing could be moved along faster without stopping the world. Make a decision; allow it to go; accept the consequences; learn from it; revise; go again. But what if your boss’ standards are different? You might be willing to sacrifice a bit of quality for speed – but what if your boss is unhappy with the quality of what you are giving him/her? Finding this right balance can be tricky.
But outside of work, the ‘rules’ of perfectionism can be different. I’m a quilter. I spent a year designing and sewing a quilt for my brother and his wife. It was a complicated pattern that required sewing squares together, cutting diamonds on the intersections, and then twisting them back to squares and sewing them back together again. You can see how it would be easy to mess that up! But I was careful and methodical, going from the floor of one bedroom to the sewing machine in another and was sure that I’d made no mistakes. It wasn’t until the borders were on the quilt that I found one square had been rotated wrong! Oh no! But the wise woman who taught me to quilt also taught me that every quilt should (or at least does) have a mistake -- and you should embrace it as a reflection of your humanness. “It will make you smile years later,” she said. My mistake on this quilt was briefly obvious to me, but my sister-in-law couldn’t see it when I pointed to the problem area. This morning, I’m with my quilt at my brother’s house and guess what -- two years later, I can’t even find it on the quilt!